During the course of the day, they might wander into the trees, away from the cabin and from the truck, examining moss and ferns, looking for fossils in rocks, which Sebastian could find but could not explain. They might take up post on a log or a flat rock, there to wait the coming of the animals and birds. Sebastian was able to remain perfectly still for quite a long while, as if he had become a rooted piece of flora struggling for life in the woods. Noname, on the other hand, was always fidgeting, scaring off the animals when they ventured too close. His hands shook a great deal, and he coughed nervously, as if he were embarrassed of something.
Sebastian was displeased, but he enjoyed Noname's company too much to make him stay behind when it came time for a walk in the forest.
Several times a week they walked to Ben Samuels, cabin to sit with him. The place was constructed of hand-cut, dressed logs, the ends notched to fit snugly, then slimed with resin and bound together with strips of bark and plastic cord (one of Samuels' few concessions to civilization). The house had a rugged facade, though the inside boasted a few pleasures one nught not expect in a handhewn dwelling, and more than a bit of refinement and quality which seemed at odds with the rural tone of everything else. For instance, Samuels had spent many long evenings sanding and polishing the interior walls of his home until the rounded humps of the logs gleamed with a rich, stained, waxed color and the grain of the wood was presented in an almost three-dimensional effect that made Sebastian feel he could delve fingers into the core of the logs.
Ben Samuels was a match for the house. He was quite an old man, in his late seventies, though occasional trips to civilization and the rejuvenation treatments taken there had kept him healthy and relatively unwanted. His arms were still well-muscled, his legs quick, his chest unsunken. His face was sharply angled, filled with wrinkles, though he said he had had those since he was a young man in the woods and that he would not let the doctors remove them on his annual visits to the city. His hands were large, gnarled, scarred with the many wounds of a lifetime as a woodsman. In sum, he appeared to be hacked from the same pine as his home.
And like his cabin, he was more inside than he appeared to be from out. He was a quiet man who read a lot. His avoidance of people was not engendered by a dislike of men, but by a sadness at watching what men did to each other in the course of their lives. Though he wondered about Sebastian having a truck of his own, he never asked questions about that, for he was sure that a story of human suffering lay behind it, and he did not want to hear what they had done to the idiot to make him run away. Those were the stories he had left the cities to forget.
Most often, Ben Samuels would be on his porch when they came, and they would sit down on the wide expanse of steps beside him, watching him whittle. Or he might have his pad and pencils again, sketching. He was good at rendering realistically. Sebastian never ceased to be amazed at the accuracy of the scene transformed to paper. It seemed to the idiot that there must be some mechanism within Samuels' hand which resorted to a memory tape of the scene to be drawn when the old man told it to, making the lines in a ,carefully pre-planned pattern. Sebastian generally accepted the existence of computers and memory tapes. He had never been able to understand men, however.
"Slept late again," Samuels would say.
Sebastian would nod. It was the old man's only admonition, for he was certain a man wasted if he didn't go to bed and rise early and labor while awake.
"The forest didn't get so big by sleeping."
"Or the stars," Sebastian would say.
Samuels would turn and look at him oddly, as if he were staring at a different person than he had thought a moment ago. "True enough."
"How is it with you?" Samuels would ask Noname.
"Cold this morning," the small creature replied.
"Cold? This? Just you wait for winter! It comes early up here, and it stays late. And then we'll see if those heating coils in the truck will keep you warm! Never trust to manufacture when you can build more reliably yourself."
The reason Samuels wanted Sebastian to sleep early and rise early was so that the daylight hours could be put to the purpose of constructing a permanent home to see them through the winter. But the winter was an eternity away as far as Sebastian was concerned. Tomorrow was the future, or perhaps only this afternoon. After an inspection of the truck and the way the rear had been converted into a semblance of a home, the old man decided the heating coils would probably keep the idiot and the puppet warmer than the cabin kept him. He had ceased to be so adamant about the necessity for a cabin, but he still mentioned it whenever he could.
Now, when Sebastian did not respond, he launched into a story about the deepest snow he had seen in all the years he had lived here, and both the idiot and the puppet grinned and settled down to listen. Ben Samuels told fine stories, even if all parts of them weren't told on a level you could understand.
Toward evening, if they did not stay to eat with Samuels, Sebastian and Noname would return to the truck, where the idiot would switch on the single light against the growing darkness. Every time, as the yellow glow appeared, he would remember that without the old woodsman they would have no light or heat. Very likely, they would have been apprehended by now, or died of exposure. Samuels had found them a mile down the highway from here, the battery dead. Sebastian knew nothing of that, and had sat stubbornly in the driver's seat some four hours before the old man found them, waiting for the truck to want to start again. Samuels had charged them from his own Rover and led them back to the trees and his cabin. Now he charged the battery every four or five days, whenever it got low again.
Every time he turned on the light, the idiot repeated to himself the importance of charging the battery. If he ever left this place, he would have to learn that an electric vehicle must be filled with electricity at regular intervals, even when its batteries are, as Samuels said, the best man had ever devised.
There, at night, with the single overhead light, he would go to work with the Furnace. Weeks earlier, parked in another forest a couple of hundred miles away from here, he had puzzled out the way the wafer was put into the machine, and he had started creating. But because the use of the two knobs confused him, the results had been distressing. The puppets had been deformed, monsters with melted faces and without eyes, with legs that seemed to have no bones, with arms that did not end in hands, but lumps of protoplasm instead. The only halfway decent result was Noname, but even he was disfigured. And despite the fact he had been formed with an identity wafer, he did not know who he was or remember any of his past periods of consciousness as should have been imprinted on the wafer. Sebastian had worked diligently after Noname, but the puppet had not signaled that the idiot was on the correct course. He had been an accident, and the puppets made after him seemed more grotesque and horrid than those which had come before. The idiot closed down the Furnace, angry and confused. He kept Noname out of the flesh bank to provide company, and together they drove north, without purpose.
Then the dead battery.
Then Ben Samuels.
And now, for three weeks, the woods and the long nights, the listening to stories and watching the old man draw. But Sebastian was restless.
He hungered for company, for the special companionship he had known with Pertos in the old days. Noname, of
course, was company of sorts, though not the kind he sought. Noname was too much like himself to really compliment his personality: floundering, lost, seeking signposts of one sort or another. Samuels did not provide what he required, for the old man was careful not to meddle, careful not to make his suggestions into commands. He could not know that, in fact, part of what the idiot required eras commanding. The world seemed increasingly unreliable and fluid, and he longed for someone like Pertos to tell him what to do with his time.
For some reason, Bitty Belina was on his mind constantly. She represented a touch with the old script, the life he had stopped leading. If he could only resurrect her, all wou
ld be well. He was sure of that. He had forgotten the way in which she had spoken to him, the way -she had laughed with the others, the way she had pleaded with him to kill Pertos.
She was a pretty puppet.
He remembered that he liked her laugh.
And her smile.
And her yellow hair.
If Bitty Belina could be returned to him, whole and safe, then all would be well. And perhaps, if she was here with him, he would stop having nightmares about a blond girl named jenny with a knife in her belly . . . If there was a panacea for all bad memories, it was Belina.
Near the end of October, he put the pieces of the Furnace together once again, in the rear of the truck. He had forgotten how to tap the vehicle's battery, but he required only a little while to relearn the technique. He rolled back the Olmescian amoeba until it clung to the rear of the machine, quivering gently, out of his way. Cautiously, he set about the clumsy work of learning godhood.
Noname watched.
This time, the deformed puppet took more of an interest in creation than he had before. In the intervening weeks, he had had an opportunity to come to know Sebastian, and he no longer feared his master as he had at first. He stood on the casing of the Furnace, near the faceplate that gave view of the capsule-womb, waiting for a miracle.
Sebastian shuffled the identity wafers, pausing to study the printing on the smooth side of each, as if some single word would pop up and stand above the incomprehensible pattern of the others: Belina. But when he had gone through all of them, he still had no idea which was hers. Two hundred and fifty puppets waited, and the chances were he would resurrect the evil stepmother, Wissa, before he called Belina to life. And he didn't want to do that, although he knew he could feed her into the Furnace again and be rid of her if she did show up before the heroine.
"What are you looking for?" Noname asked after all the discs had been passed over.
Sebastian watched the twisted face staring up at him, and he was charged with a mixture of pity and anger.
"Is there one particular puppet?" Noname asked.
"Bitty Belina," the idiot said at last.
The puppet picked up one of the discs. It was only as large as the idiot's hand, but in the small creature's fingers, it seemed like a tire from Samuels' Rover. Noname skimmed the printed material on the back and found the name of the puppet represented by the plastic wafer and the carefully etched memory circuits on the roughened side. He tossed it down and reached for another.
"You can ... find?" Sebastian asked, feeling the old excitement rise in him after all this time.
"Sure," Noname said. "Give me a couple of minutes."
It took ten minutes. He handed a wafer to Sebastian which looked exactly like all the others. "Her?"
"Her"
His fingers trembled, and he could not think what to do. Holding the identity wafer, he was holding Bitty Belina. He could almost feel the warmth of her flesh, the tremble of her pulse, the brushing coolness of her long, yellow hair. And yet this was plastic, flat and round and stupid.
Maybe it wasn't too late at all. Maybe the old life could be recalled and everything would be as before. If Bitty Belina was inside this wafer of plastic, then she couldn't have changed. She could still go back to living her old story, her old life, where her stepmother was killed by the prince and where she lived happily every after.
Then he remembered the flesh in the Furnace and knew better. The identity wafer might not be subject to change, but the flesh could be twisted and corrupted.
He felt terrible.
"Are you going to make her?" Noname asked.
Sebastian looked up, not comprehending, his eyes duller than usual, his lips slack.
"Are you going to revive her?"
After a time, he managed to say, "Yes."
Holding her plastic personality, he thought of the blue light that was focused on her when she stood in center stage. He thought of her hair gleaming with vitality, the audience held spellbound by her beauty. He did not think, even once, of the way she had stood naked between Alvon Rudi's thighs or the way she had clawed at his eyes and had bitten his neck when he came to her aid.
He slid the wafer into the Furnace and listened to the first sounds of creation stirring deep in the metal bowels. There was a prolonged grumbling noise, then the clatter of computers talking to themselves, the whine of memory tapes activated, called up from storage. The capsule-womb filled with synthetic flesh, formless now but soon to be occupied. There was a distant hissing noise, a click, then silence again. It was much like a pinball machine lighting up after accepting its dime, then waiting for the first silver bearing to be turned loose.
"Is that all?" Noname asked. He walked to the edge of the thick viewplate, his toes on the glass, looked down at the unformed jelly. "Is that all it's going to do about Bitty Belina? That blob of stuff?"
The light was green.
Sebastian touched the knobs carefully and began to experiment with them. They slid easily in either direction, as far as he wished to turn them. It was curiously comfortable sensation to hold those soft, rounded instruments cupped in the palms of his hands, as if they were more than extensions of a machine, as if they offered him an intimacy with some personality which had no identity wafer but was every bit as real as the puppets.
The light became amber.
"There's something happening now," Noname said, pointing.
The synthetic flesh curled and sought a form. But there was something about the agonizing struggle beyond the glass which bespoke sickness. It was more like a cancerous tumor burgeoning larger and larger than a healthy puppet coming to life. It squirmed and flushed with the colors of rot.
"Soon," Noname said.
But the amber was all wrong, and the idiot switched the knobs back and forth, both clockwise, both counterclockwise, now each opposed to the other in the direction of its turn. There should be crimson next, he knew, and finally the brilliantly pure white of a successful creation. As he sought those hues, his hands became more and more frantic with the knobs, and panic slowly replaced caution.
"An arm!" Noname reported, as if all were going perfectly well and Bitty Belina would be with them in short order.
But the arm was much too long, all out of proportion, with four knuckles in every finger, the fingers themselves deformed and twisted in a useless tangle.
The amber blended with yellow into fierce brightness.
The yellow became orange.
This new development made Sebastian feel better, for the orange was closer to red than anything he had thus far produced. But the deformed hand remained there all the same, and the other arm looked even worse. It was too short where the first had been too long. The fingers were intact, but the elbow joint was swollen with useless cartilage and unfunctioning bones. It curved in against the jelling body, as if the puppet were clutching its stomach in pain.
"A face," Noname Said.
It was a girl's face.
It was her face.
"Hair," Noname said.
Yellow hair crinkled below her smooth stomach, on the top of her bald head, curling down to her bare shoulders, tickling her pert breasts. He noticed one breast was set too far to the side.
"No," he said, very quietly, very softly. A disgust rose in him, possessed him, and he wanted to break things.
"Almost finished," Noname said. He did not hike the looks of what he saw, and he stepped back from the glass.
"Bitty-" Sebastian said.
As if that were a cue, she opened her eyes. She never should have been able to do that while in the womb, but she did. There was no eyeball in her left socket. The other blue gem watched him without expression.
"No," he said, speaking more loudly now.
She tried to get up from the forming tray, levering with her good elbow and her tiny feet. Still behind the glass, she seemed more like a part of a film than something real. She was still watching him in that way that told him nothing.
"Stay," he said.
She chattered. It seemed senseless.
She managed to stand, and her face was pressed tight against the viewplate, directly beneath him. She tried to
speak, but the words were not clear, even if they did contain some meaning.
He turned and ran from the truck, into the darkness, gagging and sputtering, unable to get a clean breath. In the woods, lying on wet, dead grass, he began to weep.
He watched Ben Samuels whittle and sketch. He spent long hours sitting quietly in the woods, waiting for the squirrels who were engaged in a last flurry of activity before winter set in. He watched the sky be blue and sometimes sat in the rain, feeling it. Nearly a week passed before he could bring himself to return to the Furnace and begin his experiments again. Even then, there was a horror waiting just below the surface of his mind, ready to possess him at the slightest opportunity.
He decided against using Bitty Belina's identity wafer until he had the process conquered. When he could bring her back in her full beauty, then it would be safe to use her disc.
"Which do you want to use?" Noname asked, sitting by the stacks of identity wafers.
Sebastian thought for a long while. He could remember only a few of the puppets' names. One other that stuck in his mind quite as strongly as Bitty Belina was a grotesque little monster named Wolf, the villain of a horror story that was quite popular everywhere it was performed. He would not mind experimenting with Wolf, for if Wolf turned out deformed it was only just punishment for him.
"Wolf," he told Noname.
"Wolf what?"
"Just Wolf."
Noname found it shortly. He handed it to Sebastian who took it with some reluctance. If he had felt the sensuousness, the warmth and delicacy of Bitty Belina when he had held her wafer, what would he feel while handling this one? Death and blood and ruthlessness? He took it at last but was surprised to discover he felt nothing at all. Just cool plastic, smooth on one side and rough on the other.
Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0) Page 6
